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Apple Airs New iPad mini Commercials→

Apple Airs New iPad mini Commercials

Following the “Piano” ad launched after the announcement of the iPad mini, today Apple aired two new commercials for the device. Named “Books” and “Photos”, both commercials focus on showing the size difference between the regular iPad and the iPad mini. More importantly, both ads want to communicate the simple message that the iPad mini is smaller in size, but also just as capable in terms of functionality: the iPad mini runs the same apps of the bigger iPad, therefore making it a “real” iPad, only smaller (and thus more portable). This follows the tagline on the product page: There’s less of it, but no less to it.

As noted by Jordan Golson at MacRumors, the commercials rely on clever pairings of books and photos to compare the two iPad models. For books, Apple uses The Sun Also Rises and The Valley of the Moon; East of Eden and How the West Was Won; Moby Dick and Gone Fishing.

The new commercials aren’t available on Apple’s YouTube channel yet, but they have been uploaded to Apple’s website. You can watch them here.

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iPad mini: Our Complete Overview

Phil Schiller took the stage today at Apple’s media event in San Jose to officially unveil the iPad mini, Apple’s latest entry in the iPad line-up.

As widely rumored, the iPad mini features the same 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad with a smaller, 7.9” display carrying the same resolution of the original iPad and iPad 2 – 1024x768. The smaller display has allowed Apple to cut down the overall size of the device, which also features a lighter form factor and thinner design, as well as narrower borders. The iPad mini is, from a design standpoint, reminiscent of the iPad 2 and third-generation iPad, with a flat aluminum back, albeit with more rounded edges.

iPad mini is every inch an iPad. With its gorgeous 7.9-inch display, iPad mini features the same number of pixels as the original iPad and iPad 2, so you can run more than 275,000 apps designed specifically for iPad,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

Hardware

The iPad mini comes in two colors: white & silver and black & slate. The biggest feature, however, is its design, which is only 7.2mm thin and 53% lighter than the third generation iPad. Schiller compared the thinness of the iPad mini to a pencil. The iPad mini weighs 0.68lbs, making it as “light as a pad of paper”. Read more

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event→

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event

As reported by Techie Buzz, Apple has decorated the California Theatre in San Jose, CA – the location for its upcoming media event next Tuesday – with colorful banners. Using the same graphical approach of the media invitation, the banners show an Apple logo inside a “psychedelic” background that also forms an Apple logo. The theatre marquee simply read “Apple Special Event”.

As we noted when Apple sent the invitations for the event to the press, the graphics are somewhat reminiscent of the first iPad event’s invitation, as well as background images Apple has used for recent events in San Francisco. Continuing an unofficial trend that has members of the press constantly speculating, Apple this time chose to use a “We’ve got a little more to show you” tagline.

Apple is, in fact, rumored to be announcing a smaller version of the iPad next week. Rumored to be called “iPad Mini”, the device will likely feature a 7.85-inch display and a thinner, lighter form factor. However, recent rumors have claimed Apple will also announce iBooks 3.0, a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and new iMacs and Mac minis at next week’s event.

Check out the entire photo gallery at Techie Buzz.

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Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

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Project Gemini Is a New iPad Illustration App Coming from Adobe→

Along with details about the forthcoming Photoshop for iPad, Adobe has announced another brand new iPad app coming soon, dubbed Project Gemini:

Today we announced Project Gemini—a focused new app focused specifically on drawing and painting. Building on Photoshop’s powerful brush engine, this new app combines powerful Photoshop brushes, precise and scalable vector brushes, and an entirely new category of groundbreaking Live oil and watercolor brushes – you’ve never seen anything like them. In addition, layers, selections, and masks enable the most modern non-destructive drawing and editing workflows.

Most importantly, though, we’ve built Project Gemini with the illustration community.

Kyle Webster, of KyleBrush.com, joined Adobe in 2017 to help build Gemini and act as an ambassador and advocate for the illustration community. Along with Kyle, a group of illustrators with diverse styles and backgrounds have been working closely with us to help Gemini achieve its potential.

According to the announcement post, the genesis of this new app was advancements in hardware that enabled Adobe’s team to build more powerful tools than were previously possible. They highlight “selection and masking tools, combined raster and vector drawing capabilities” as some examples.

I’m not in the target market for this app, but I’m excited to see Adobe continue to rethink how modern iPads can enable more powerful, yet accessible app experiences than before.

If you’d like to join the Gemini beta when it begins, Adobe has a short survey available for interested testers.

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Hoplite: A Mini Dungeon Turn-Based Strategy Game for iPhone and iPad

Each step feels more perilous than the last. As you dash over a pool of lava, you lunge to slay a demon archer, cornered and unprepared for the daring attack. Looking ahead it seems all but impossible to make the last jump, as demon footmen move to block the exit. Throwing your spear, you impale the dark beast, only to be greeted by a bomb that lands behind your feet. You bash away the bomb with your shield, taking out another demon as it explodes at a distance. Leaping across the last chasm, a lapse in judgement leaves you directly in the crosshairs of a second archer, who fires an arrow directly into your exposed side as you land.

And thus ends the quest for the Fleece.

This is Hoplite, where a pair of sandals, a trusty spear, sturdy shield, and three hearts are all that protect you from hordes of demons in the Underworld. Your quest is to recover the Fleece and make it out alive, but the journey is treacherous.

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Opera Mini 6 for iPad Reviewed

There isn’t any stiff competition on the iPad when it comes to third party browsers, but one could arguably assert that Opera has a widely recognizable name when it comes to the mobile browser space; we’re sure the Opera community would enjoy additional exposure on iOS alongside the dominant focus on Android. Unfortunately, Opera’s attention to Android has tended to be a problem when it comes to curating its iOS app. When Opera for the iPhone launched to the surprise of many in 2010, the app fell by the wayside with a lack of enthusiasm and was seemingly forgotten about as Opera for the iPhone never updated to take advantage of the Retina Display. Opera had seemingly lost interest in supporting iOS, that is until an updated Opera Mini 6 landed on the App Store as a universal app, bringing an updated interface and some extra polish to their mobile app. It remains to be seen whether Opera will continue to provide consistent updates to their mobile browser on iOS, but that doesn’t mean we won’t provide our take on the current “red O”.

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Opera Mini for iPad Now Available

A few months after the first teaser shots and previews that confirmed Opera was working on an iPad version of its alternative browser featuring visual tabs and updated sharing options for the larger screen, the Norwegian company has finally released an update to its Opera Mini web browser this morning, bringing new features and an updated interface to the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, but most of all a native version to the iPad. You can find Opera for iPad now in the App Store.

We’ll have a full review of Opera for iPad later this week on MacStories, but in the meantime we’ve taken the app for a quick spin and we’re positively impressed with it. Visual tabs play an important role on the iPad, as they allow you to keep multiple pages open at once and actually see their previews concurrently on screen to quickly switch between them. Animations of the tab drawer at the top seem very smooth, though I’ve noticed that Opera Mini for iPad sometimes opens web pages in their iPhone mobile web view, rather than the desktop one as Safari for iPad does by default. This might be related to the server-side compression Opera does to speed up browsing, but we’ll make sure to further look into the Settings to resolve this issue. As for other features, a big Opera logo in the upper left corner allows you to access a popup menu with Bookmarks, History, Settings, and Sharing options, which include Facebook, Twitter and My Opera. Pages can be opened in background tabs, and overall the interface has been polished to look great on the iPhone 4 with minor tweaks here and there as well.

From the changelog:

  • Updated design with a fresh new look and feel
  • Super smooth pinch-to-zoom and panning
  • Support for iPhone 4 retina display, iPad, and iPad 2 devices
  • Direct share on Facebook, Twitter, and My Opera
  • Open new page in background tab
  • Improved international font support for Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other non-latin languages

Opera Mini for iPad can be downloaded here for free. Check out more screenshots and the promo video below. Read more